My talk will address the temporal uncertainty inherent in the construction phase of every used building; that point in time when work has begun and the building has a physical presence, but still retains the potential not to ever see the completion of that defined phase of work and the building’s intended occupation or use. It builds on previous work of mine where I have investigated the importance of planning committee meetings as places and spaces in which multiple, competing conceptions of a building or site’s past, present and future are presented, promoted and argued, often in very short periods of time, before a decision is taken by elected officials on which of those conceptions will be privileged with physical expression in the world.

Hopefully I will be able to explain the importance of this work and the perspective it promotes to the wider field of buildings archaeology, a field which most usually, taking a lead from art historical approaches to the same material, finds itself confined to the linear progression from architectural design to de-occupation, often with an emphasis on the former, without regard to the extreme precarity inherent in the whole ‘life’ of a building as it moves between different forms of being there and not being there. Is is possible, or even useful, to reconsider our approach to the entire built environment?

Also though, I’ll be discussing the work of some interesting artists who have engaged with the same phenomenon and asking whether their work can provide useful prompts to begin to understand it archaeologically and to present more widely the perspective it brings.